| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文學系 === 82 ===
The Sound and the Fury was William Faulkner's favorite work. In started with a mental picture of Faulkner's: A little girl climbs up a tree to look into the parlor window, where her grandmother's funeral is taking place. According to Faulkner, he could never tell the story right so he Iet one narrator after another tell the same story. When the book was published in 1929, it was composed of four sections, told by four different narrators. However, Faulkner was still not satisfied with it. It was not until he wrote the appendix sixteen years after its publication that he could have some peace. This thesis is thus an attempt to reread The Sound and the Fury through the appendix.
In my opinion, Faulkner's “tell it right”has at least two levels of meaning: One is to unravel the plot, making it clearer and clearer to the reader; the other is to make the story match his initial image. When the novel appeared in 1929, he did succeed in making the latter sections of the novel clarify the former ones, but the social background of the story, the symbolic significance of Caddy and what attitude we should take toward its ending remained obscure. Consequently, the appendix,I believe, was written to compensate for the three shortcomings.
By expanding the time-span of the story and delivering it almost chronologically, the appendix helps us understand the tragedy of the Compsons more deeply. placing Caddy at the center of the appendix and adding the episode of the librarian, Melissa Meek, who tries to save Caddy, Faulkner elevated Caddy to a symbol of rebellion. Offering a short account of the Gibsons, the black family serving the Compsons, at the end of the appendix, Faulkner led us to ee the Compsons in contrast to the Gibsons.
Though Faulkner tried hard to tell the story right in the appendix, he still considered it a failure. To some extent, the novel reveals the limitation of language. One's effort to recover the original image of one thing by means of language is doomed to be a failure. However, put in a larger historical frame, the novel grows incessantly. It grows from the story of a Southern family to that of the American South and from the latter to that of the whole human beings. It is the universal truths inherent in the novel that make it everlasting.
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